Book Review: Crime and punishment in contemporary culture
| Author | Vincenzo Ruggiero |
| DOI | 10.1177/146247450500700112 |
| Published date | 01 January 2005 |
| Date | 01 January 2005 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
References
Cainker, Louise (2002) ‘No longer invisible: Arab and Muslim exclusion after Septem-
ber 11’, Middle East Report 224 (Fall).
Penny Green
Westminster University, UK
Crime and punishment in contemporary culture, Claire Valier. London: Routledge, 2004.
192 pp. £60. ISBN 041528175X (hbk).
The society in which we live is indeed ‘iconocentric’, as Claire Valier stresses referring
to the macabre images which attribute meaning to the issues of crime control and penal
practice. In this book she attempts to chart the visual culture that accompanies penality
and the impact of information technologies on punitive cultures. ‘It is time to look into
the changing textual, rhetorical and pictorial practices through which penal practices
draw the imaginative engagement of multiple viewing and reading publics’ (p. 2). The
key focus of the book is, simultaneously, the way in which the ‘dominant aesthetic’ of
mainstream public culture is responded to by counter-aesthetics emerging through
critical interventions of different sorts. Among the former type of aesthetic, Valier
mentions the use of images of crime victims and their relatives in political campaign-
ing and their alleged power to convert voters. For example, when punitive subjects are
mobilized and harsh measures are invoked, electoral messages may generate complicity,
whereby voters are led to vote for themselves. Oppositional communication, however,
can provide alternative interpretations of crime and punishment and, through subversive
irony, turn dominant images upside down. These counter-aesthetics challenge the
dominant public culture, resist and subvert the binary logic opposing criminal and non-
criminal, illegal and legal, victim and offender. In brief, they contest the communicative
flows which address audiences as vengeful citizens. In other words, the official spectacle
of crime and punishment is seen as ambiguous, reversible, open to critique: cultures,
including dominant cultures, are less an expression of shared beliefs and sensibilities
than sites of contestation.
The author develops her argument after setting a theoretical distance between hers
and Foucault’s analysis, the latter being characterized by an alleged rigidity in distin-
guishing between old ‘societies of the spectacle’ and modern ‘societies of surveillance’.
She also rejects Durkheim’s suggestion that penality is bound to evolve from severity
and a desire to destroy to reintegration and a need to regulate. Valier supports her thesis
by offering a variety of materials whose homogeneity some may find lacking, never-
theless the creativity of the demonstration as a whole is to be appreciated. In Chapter
1 it is argued that the spectacle of suffering, in contemporary societies, may not be
expressed through a blind power over bodies, but it is transmitted to the arena of
criminal detection, engaging ‘onlookers as audiences of fearful victims and enraged
avengers’ (p. 35). The author then moves on to analyse the Dreyfus case, showing how
punishment can help constitute a space for the establishment of national identities and
imagined communities. A similar function is attributed to some of the work of the
Chicago School of Sociology, which is interpreted as an effort to demarcate, through
the emphasis on crime and migration, a notion of nationals as opposed to foreigners.
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